Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

That was a wonderful hour of the day. The morning shoot ended at about half past ten, when we came back to camp after tramping through the bush and the mealies for nearly four hours. We had the sour, dissipated look of unshaven men who have not breakfasted, the look that is permanent with tramps. First we drank the beer which, carefully kept in the shade, held still the cold of the night. Then we cooked a meal without the customary limitations of meals; so long as you were hungry, John would produce another chop, more bacon, more kidneys. Then we took turns to use the tin basin for washing and shaving. Only Hughie did not shave; he went to lie in his tent — he was also the only one who slept in a tent, an inflatable thing that he put up with a bicycle pump.

A noon silence fell. The sun was a power in the bush; nothing moved; the thorns glittered; Patterson took his shirt off and put it over his face to keep off the flies. My blankets were under a thorn-tree, but the shade was nothing more than a net between me and the sun. The doves sounded regularly as breathing.

At some point when we were all asleep or seemingly asleep, Hughie would come quietly out of his tent with his gun and go off into the bush. Once he brought back a hare, a poor thing with ears full of bloated black ticks. ‘The boys’ll eat it,’ he said. ‘Here! Samuel!’ Bleary-eyed and sweating he would wait for us to make ready for the afternoon shoot, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand after a long drink of water, and keeping his head cocked, listening. ‘That crowd that feeds in the ground-nut field, they’re there already. S’tru’as God. They’re not resting in any bush.’ He watched us resentfully. And mostly, after the first day, when we were all out together he would leave us after the first few minutes, and disappear, with or without Eilertsen, for hours. We would find him at the car or back at the camp, counting his bag. He out-walked and out-shot everybody. ‘Let’s go and murder the bastards!’

John said, troubled, ‘Kidd takes it all too seriously. You know what I mean? He doesn’t get a kick out of just walking through the bush.’

‘It’s his way of talking.’ Patterson was amused, as he might have been amused by an almost-human chimpanzee. He said to me later,’ That chap’s the most inarticulate blighter I’ve ever met. South Africans are a pretty inarticulate lot, anyway, don’t you think?’

‘He’s got plenty to say for himself about everything under the sun.’

‘Oh he’d chat to Einstein about relativity. But he’s only got a few words to get along with; they have to fit every conceivable situation. Makes him sound like a savage.’

‘That’s what he calls the two Nyasas.’

‘Those two gentlemen. I must say, they’re not more than one jump out of the trees; John really is unbelievably patient with them. I felt like giving that one careless little bastard a kick in the pants this morning — if he’d been my own boy. The way he gutted those birds, simply hacked them to bits.’

‘Well, it’s all relative, I suppose, this savage business.’

He looked at me with curiosity for a moment, as if he had just remembered something. ‘D’you believe these black chaps could ever be the same as us, Hood?’

I heard Steven’s voice, mimicking him perfectly. Yet Steven was not Patterson, was not even me; was not Tanwell and the other Nyasa, chopping wood ten yards away as if all tasks were one.

‘Never. The French are not the same, or the Germans or the Italians. They’ll do all the things we do, but they’ll be themselves.’

He laughed, from that private vantage point on which I sometimes felt he was caught, unable to get down. He waved me away, as if I had offered him an evasion. ‘Run their own show? I’d like to see it. I just don’t think the poor chaps have got the brain. They’re limited. It’s just not there.’ He put down the rag with which he had been cleaning his gun. ‘Come on, let’s get some of those papiermâché things from the whisky bottles and stick ’em up on the mealies. See if I can hit a target, if nothing else, today.’ Big, handsome ruin, paunched, pouched and veined; sauntering heavily over the clods he reminded me of one of those splendid houses, thrown open to the public at half-a-crown a time, that seem to regard the trippers amusedly, and are seen by the trippers amusedly, as something over-blown and gone to pot.

In the bush I usually walked with John. The eager face of the dog, turning suddenly, beckoned us; the tip of her tail bled from the thorns and her ears held the seeds of khaki-weed like a magnet that has trailed through a box of pins; at night she was too exhausted to eat, and lay looking at us over the weight of the death growing in her belly, but in the bush during the day she seemed to outrun it. ‘I don’t think she can be as ill as you think,’ I said to John. ‘No, ‘he said,’ she’s finished. Like a good race-horse, she’ll go on till she drops.’

These were the clichés of the Alexanders’ world, the curiously dated world of the rich, with its Edwardian-sounding pleasures. They thought of courage in terms of gallantry, spirit in terms of gameness; in the long run, I supposed my mother’s and my father’s definitions were my own, I could really only think of these things in terms of political imprisonment and the revolt of the intellect.

But beneath John’s social sophistication, his equipment for Johannesburg, there was a strongly appealing quality. He reduced life to the narrative; we trekked through the thorns and the grass and all our faculties were taken up with what we were doing and where we were going. His thin brown face, alert above a bobbing adam’s apple, was a commonplace reassurance, like the image of some simple, not very powerful, household god who serves to hold back the impact of mystery from ordinary life.

On Monday evening, I lost the others and found myself alone in the darkening bush. I walked about a bit, but was defeated by the silent sameness and thought it more sensible to stay still awhile, and listen; I had discovered that if you forced your hearing capacity, you could very often part the silence of the bush and make out, far away, the sounds — like feeble bird-sounds muffled in the nest — of men talking. I smoked and listened; the ground was pink as warm stone and the thorn trees were wrought iron. Presently I separated from the furtive rustle of the bush, the faint panting of the dog. It seemed to reach me along the ground, on a rill of air. I called, and though there was no answer, in a little while, the dog, held on the leash by the younger Nyasa, appeared. Sometimes, when the dog saw a lot of guinea-fowl moving in a field, she lost her head and wanted to give chase. It was then that if the Africans had been taken along as beaters, John would give her to one of them to hold.

‘I can’t find the baas,’ said the African.

‘It’s all right, I’m lost too,’ I said. ‘Let the dog lead.’ We followed her half-hearted zig-zag for a few minutes. The thorn bushes were black splotches, like an attack of dizziness.

‘I don’t think we should just keep on walking, do you?’

He stood there with the dog and said nothing. I sat down and he settled a yard away. When I spoke to him he did not answer, unless what I said was a direct question. He wore broken sand-shoes, out of which the little toe stuck on each foot, and a torn dirty khaki shirt and a pair of brown striped trousers that must once have belonged to a man with a big belly — they were folded over in front, under a belt, like a dhoti — and he must have been cold; a kind of feverish chill ran over the ground the moment the sun dropped.

At last I did not try to talk any more, and we sat there, together. The dog was exhausted, and slept. He did not look at me or at anything; his isolation came to me silently; I was aware of it then, but it must have existed all the time, while we ate and we drank and we sang and we cursed, in our camp. I offered him a cigarette but he would not take it from the packet and he cupped his hands and I had to drop the cigarette into them. Loneliness gathered with the chill, a miasma of the ancient continent; he and I were in hand’s reach of each other, like people standing close, and unaware of it, in a fog.